German Patent No. 35 36 820 describes a design for receivers in which traffic messages are transmitted in a standardized manner. Route guidance names, usually place names, are assigned to predetermined freeway numbers or highway numbers and standard texts are provided to permit very rapid transmission of encoded traffic messages. The highway numbers, route guidance names and other place names as well as the standard texts are filed in a memory and are also carried in a corresponding radio receiver. If a traffic bottleneck occurs, the information is transmitted digitally in the form of abbreviations and then is compiled in the radio receiver to form a complete message. This achieves the result that complete traffic messages may be transmitted with very few bytes, so that a great many traffic messages may be transmitted in a relatively short period of time even with less efficient data transmission systems.
This becomes problematical when the freeway or highway designations have changed or place names or other route guidance names have been changed as part of restructuring measures. Then place name information is reproduced by a radio receiver equipped with a corresponding memory, but it is no longer readable in this form on traffic signs, for example, so the driver becomes irritated.
To eliminate these disadvantages, German Patent Application No. 199 05 893 describes a method of transmitting digitally encoded traffic messages.
This makes it possible to deal with revised place names and also to transmit place names which are not provided in an original memory of the radio receiver. In addition, since there has been a steady increase in digital message transmission by radio, and furthermore since transmission methods which are also capable of transmitting a high data volume have recently become available, it is also possible to completely eliminate the need for a memory in the radio receiver or to file only the predetermined standard texts in this memory and to append the place information to the digitally encoded traffic message in general. This greatly increases the flexibility of the traffic messages to be transmitted digitally. The header is used to allow the radio receiver to recognize that not only are digitally encoded traffic messages being transmitted but also that the digitally encoded traffic data is being followed by place information or other additional information.